All I Ever Wanted (11 page)

‘You first,' she says, taking a huge swig. She sits on the floor. ‘Let me guess. A dancer. You've got the legs for it.'

‘Wrong. Way wrong,' I laugh. I'd love to be able to dance. Again, it comes down to being able to look at yourself in the mirror.

‘Okay. What about…a dealer.'

‘You think I look like a dealer?' I gulp. Is it possible that she knows?

‘You know, a card dealer. At the casino.'

‘Where did you get that idea?'

‘I don't know. You've got one of those faces I can't read. You'd make a good poker player.'

‘I'm still at school,' I say, before I can feel worse about not being any of those things. ‘One more year.'

‘Wow. You must like it a lot to keep going, huh?'

I snort and she finds it hilarious. She laughs with her whole body, not just her face. She crosses her legs and I notice she has purple toenails, like mine.

There are no photos anywhere. Nothing really tells me who she is or who she isn't, if I don't count the barely there underwear on top of the pile of clothes on the floor. One print of a Greek island with those perfect white buildings that look like they're about to slide off the edge of the hillside. All those little oblong doors, beckoning. A place where the sea and the sky are the same colour. Her stuff is thrown about like she doesn't care where it lands. There are unopened boxes stacked in one corner. Only the Buddha looks like he's been put there for a reason.

‘So, what do you do, since you left school?' I press.

She lights a cigarette. ‘Phone sex,' she announces in an offhand way. ‘Easy money.' She blows her smoke away from me in a way I find curiously courteous.

‘We've heard some stuff,' I confess.

‘Yeah, sorry about that. Sometimes I put them on speaker. I didn't realise until you came over the other day. I could tell you were wondering. Want another?' She's finished her drink.

When I look at mine I realise it's almost gone, too. It tastes as harmless as cordial. At least with champagne there's a deadly aftertaste that reminds you it's alcoholic. My arms and legs feel looser. I like it, so I nod.

‘When do you think the power will come back on?'

‘Could be hours. It's okay, I'll stay with you.'

The candle stump is drowning in its own wax. This drink slides down even more easily than the first. The blood in my veins slows to a crawl.

‘Thanks. I hate the dark,' she says again.

We end up at either end of the couch, our purple toes and crossed legs almost identical. I tell her about Jordan and his treason and about the drive-by that I suspect is Brant Welles. About Tahnee and our fight. I tell her I call her Lola, and she laughs. She doesn't mind.

She tells me she's going back to school. She wants to be a nurse. She tells me about a man called Max who calls every second night and pays her four dollars a minute to listen to him. He talks to her while his wife is asleep and he's sitting in a cupboard.

‘What a weirdo.' I shiver.

‘He's just lonely. You can't tell much about a person without seeing them on a good day, and a bad day,' she says. ‘They're not all horrible people.'

I wonder how she can be so accepting of her life. Squatting in the worst house in the worst street in the worst suburb. Talking dirty to strangers and listening to their problems. Living like a nocturnal creature.

‘I hate living here,' I say.

She nods and shrugs. ‘I just think of everything as only temporary. Look, sometimes I don't even unpack.' She points to the boxes.

‘Don't you have any family?'

‘Not here. Not any more. They moved away and I stayed because I thought I was in love with this guy but then it turned out he was a complete loser.'

‘Yeah. I know the feeling.'

Lola goes still. She puts her hand on my arm and her stillness passes to me.

‘What?' I say. I can't hear anything over the hum of my blood and the mosquitoes.

She points to the front window. A shadow moves from one side to the other. The scrape of branches flinging back. A shape at the glass.

I was right about the gaps in the dark.

‘There's someone out there,' she whispers. ‘He's back.'

We hold hands like small children and crouch under the kitchen table. It's absurd, but I feel like laughing. Lola holds a knife in one hand, her phone in the other.

‘I could go out the back way and get Mum,' I offer.

‘Don't you dare leave me,' she says.

‘There's two of us. What can he do?'

Lola scuttles across the kitchen floor to the back door. She checks the lock and crawls back under the table.

‘Let's just go and have a look around,' I say. ‘We'll make a lot of noise.'

Her breath is coming fast and she looks like a hunted thing.

‘I can't,' she says. ‘I can't go out there.'

‘I can,' I say. I stand on wobbly legs. Maybe the booze is giving me a dose of Dutch courage.

I go to the lounge room and pick up the candle in its saucer. Hot wax runs along my thumb and immediately hardens like a second skin. Lola is behind me, one hand on my back. Her knife catches the candlelight.

‘Don't open it. Please,' Lola begs.

‘It's fine, it'll be fine,' I slur.

We open the door and stand there, listening.

‘I can't hear anything.'

‘Me either.'

‘What's that?'

The flame flickers in the warm breeze, then goes out. Something moves to the right, outside Lola's bedroom window. Lola screams and I jump, my hands flying up into the air. The candle and the saucer pitch into the bushes.

All at once:

‘Shit, Lola!' Me.

‘Eeeeek!' Lola.

And a howl, followed by crashing and flailing as a man lumbers out into the street, beating at his face with his hands. He keeps going, past the dark lamp posts, until I can't see him any more.

Lola runs inside the house and slams the door, leaving me on the porch. The street is empty. There's a stinging pain in my back.

‘Lola, it's okay, I got him,' I hiss through the door. ‘He's gone. Open up.' I twist my arm backwards to explore the pain. My fingers come away sticky with blood. ‘Come on, let me in. I'm bleeding.'

The door opens.

Lola's face has no colour. ‘You're crazy,' she accuses.

‘You're a certifiable lunatic.'

‘You stabbed me,' I say.

‘Oh, shit.' She pulls up my top and checks me over. ‘It's nothing, just a scrape.'

‘I need to use your toilet.'

‘Are you going to be sick?' she asks.

‘No. Maybe. I don't know.'

I'm feeling floaty and benevolent with booze. I'd give my last dollar to a bum. Maybe I'm in shock.

While I sit, the power comes back on and there's a distant cheer. Violent white light makes me blink. A mosquito lands on my arm and I let it drink. I peel a strip of wax the shape of Portugal from my thumb, roll it into a ball and drop it into the toilet. On the back of the door there's a calendar that's stuck on October. When my eyes adjust to the light, I read the inspirational quote at the bottom of the page.

‘Responsibility is a detachable burden easily shifted to the
shoulders of God, Fate, Fortune, Luck or one's neighbour.'
Ambrose Bierce

I flush, holding my arm still until the mosquito lets go. It takes off, drunk and clumsy. I turn the page to December.

‘The poor man is not he without a cent, but he who is without
a dream.' Harry Kemp

There's one more, a bonus month for the new year. I tear off the quote at the bottom, fold it into a neat square and put it in my pocket.

Sometimes there are signs.

FOURTEEN

On Thursday morning I have a mild hangover, but Mum drags me out of bed so we can get to the Remand Centre before the mid-morning rush.

‘Just as well they're in a box,' I say. I grit my teeth against the sound of grinding gears. ‘It stinks in here.' Witchy. Eye of something and toe of something else. My stomach is churning.

‘Thanks to Mrs Tkautz, we don't have to take the bus,' Mum says, then tells me the last time she drove a manual was in 1994.

We hardly speak. If I open my mouth it might all come out. But then I've never really confided in Mum, and she's never really been the type of mother to listen. She's a sorter. Tell her the problem and she'll fix it. She's infamous for overturning suspensions, mostly for the boys.

Two years ago I came home with a suspension notice for smoking. So did about seven other girls, because the teachers' sting operations are usually pretty successful during P.E. When I told Mum, she marched me back down to the school office and demanded a retraction: her daughter didn't smoke, therefore the teacher had made a mistake. As usual, she was embarrassing, but spectacular.

On the way out of the principal's office I asked her, ‘How'd you know I wasn't smoking?' I
was
innocent and, for a moment, I thought she had faith in me.

She just shrugged. ‘I don't know if you were or you weren't. But you don't get a holiday on my time.'

When we get to the Remand Centre she drives around and around the car park, waiting for a decent spot. On the sixth lap I lose it.

‘Geez, just park anywhere and we'll walk, Mum.'

‘All right for you, bones. Anyway, I didn't even want you to come, so shut it, will you?'

‘Why not?'

‘Because if we have to wait for hours I've got to sit and watch you looking down your nose at everyone.'

‘I do not,' I say, peeved.

‘Yes, you do. You do it to me, so what hope have the inmates got?'

She spots a woman with jangling keys and follows her at a crawl. The woman looks behind, frowning. She lights a smoke. Mum waits patiently. The woman takes long, luxurious drags and looks around her, ignoring us.

‘What's her problem? Is she going, or what?'

‘Yeah. She's razzing you. Sick her, Mum.'

Mum slings a sideways look. ‘That's not necessary.'

‘That's not necessary,' I mimic in a posh voice. ‘Who are you and what have you done with my mother?'

‘Shut your pie-hole.'

‘Oh, there she is.'

‘I mean it. And when we see Matty you put a smile on your face and stay off your soapbox. Got it? Or you're not going to see your next birthday.'

‘What about Dill?'

‘Dill's not here. He's been transferred until his hearing. Apparently they want to keep the boys separate because they do too much
collaboratin
g.' She lets go of the steering wheel and curls her fingers into inverted commas.

‘Do you think they'll get out soon?'

‘Maybe. I don't know. This time somebody's given a statement against them.'

‘Who?'

‘Shit, Mim, if I knew, don't you think I'd do something?' Her voice is tight as wire.

I shut my pie-hole. The woman finally gets into her bomb and reverses out.

Inside we wait our turn in the administration area. I flick through a magazine with impossible people and improbable products while Mum fills out forms.

There are only two types of people here. Criminals and their kin, and starched people with qualifications. I look at my purple toes and Mum's eighties half-perm and I know exactly which type we are.

Mum hands me a visitor pass and tells me to pin it on. She gives me a nudge when I stare too long at a man with no shoes and no hope and that slack-jawed look of a heavy drinker.

It's not that I hate poor people. Or people who are having shitty luck. I hate
being
poor. In my experience, poverty makes people do things they don't want to do. The ones that don't get out stay aimless and teach their kids to do the same thing and the cycle goes on and on. I hate that I have to fight to get out because nobody holds the door open and wishes you a good trip. That would mean there's a way out. The fact is, the poverty line is just a rung on a ladder that some people can't be bothered to climb. There's nobody above with a foot on their head.

For two hours, we wait. The walls are bare and grey. I get a cup of water from the cooler but it tastes warm and plasticky. I check my phone every minute in case the ring-tone isn't working, but there's nothing.

Tahnee must be really pissed off at me. Phone silence is torture. I can't bring myself to send her a message first, and anyway, I don't know what I can say that will fix us.

We're called through into another room. One of the starched people takes our bags and tells us to empty our pockets. We step through a metal detector, like the ones at the airport.

All this compliance can make you feel guilty. Mum says nothing. She knows the drill.

Finally, we're shown into an area with scattered tables and chairs. When Matt comes in, it hits me how small he looks. He's a big guy, meaty like Mum and well over six foot. Dill's even bigger, although he's younger. The grey rooms have shrunk Matt and sucked the colour out.

‘How's my girls,' he says, and it's not a question. He sits, spilling over the edges of the fold-out chair.

‘Good, good, we're all good,' Mum says, and it's not a real answer. ‘And you?'

‘Can't complain. Food's crap but we have an ironing lady.'

It's like they're conversing in code. This isn't how we speak to each other. At home, especially when the boys are around, it's more like a series of grunts. Slang and slander, heckling and haggling.

‘How long do we get?' I ask, for lack of anything else.

‘Half an hour.'

I don't think I can stand half an hour of this. Watching them skate around each other. Usually there's so much personality banging around our house I half expect the walls to fall in from the reverb.

‘How's the kid?' Matt asks.